Stop Abuse Campaign. Childhood trauma, data science, healing.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

The ACE test is ten questions that show the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and negative health outcomes later in life. Your score can reveal an increased likelihood for a heart attack or stroke, depression or alcoholism. It’s even an indicator of life expectancy. It can tell you all of this without asking a single question about your medical history - to make a long story short, childhood trauma creates toxic stress, and that stress doesn’t go away unless we identify it and do something about it. Here’s Dr. Nadine Burke Harris talking about the ACE test in more detail:

Our partner Stop Abuse Campaign helps people begin to heal from childhood trauma. They administer the ACE test online, and have already helped over 100,000 people understand their health risks. They do all of this from a perspective that’s informed by trauma, and they prevent adverse childhood experiences through research, policy, and education.

Here’s what that means in practice: Stop Abuse Campaign is in the trenches fighting for laws that will stop abuse, and they’ve been winning. Several victories have resulted in policymakers signing legislation that helps survivors, and prevents abuse from happening in the first place.

It’s been great working with people who are so embedded in a cause that’s difficult to even discuss at times. Like a lot of great nonprofits, Stop Abuse Campaign is busy. Necessity forces senior leadership to wear many hats, and sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day to focus on everything that needs to be done.

Sable’s work with Stop Abuse Campaign started the way a lot of our partnerships do; we admired the work they were doing, so we were eager to see how we could help. We started with managing their google ads. We’ve since launched their most successful ad campaigns to date, and have helped thousands of additional people to learn more about how they can heal from childhood trauma.

We’re working to update their website. With each update, we’re increasing the amount of people that are taking the ACE test and learning how to heal from trauma.

Data visualization was something that Stop Abuse Campaign has been interested in, but hasn’t been able to earnestly pursue because of their commitment to other programs. We’ve taken Stop Abuse Campaign’s existing data and are transforming it into one of the most comprehensive datasets surrounding adverse childhood experiences to date.

Stop Abuse Campaign is a nonprofit that’s trying to make itself unnecessary. That sounds bad, but we mean it as a compliment. Nonprofits exist to solve problems, not self-perpetuate, endlessly running programs that don’t have any long-term benefit for the people they’re meant for. Every conversation we’ve had with their team has been rooted in solving the problem of child abuse.

If you’re interested, you can take your ACE test. You can also donate to support Stop Abuse Campaign.